The NEIU Libraries is hosting a physical book display in honor of Disabilities Awareness Month - be sure to swing by the Ronald Williams Library to check it out!  For more Disabilities Awareness Month fun, check out this curated list of eBooks and streaming videos you can read and watch for free through the NEIU Libraries!

   

 

eBooks:

Cover ArtThe Life Worth Living by Joel Michael Reynolds
ISBN: 9781452961545
Publication Date: 2022-05-17
A philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain   More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: "let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires. The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.
 
Cover ArtNo Pity by Joseph P. Shapiro
ISBN: 0812924126
Publication Date: 1994-10-25
People with disabilities forging the newest and last human rights movement of the century.
 
 
 
 
Cover ArtCrip Theory by Robert McRuer; Michael Bérubé (Foreword by)
ISBN: 0814759866
Publication Date: 2006-06-01

A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other. Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

 

Cover ArtBrilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare
ISBN: 0822373521
Publication Date: 2017-01-06

In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure--the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.

 

Cover ArtJust Care by Akemi Nishida
ISBN: 9781439919910
Publication Date: 2022-07-15
Just Care is Akemi Nishida's thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change. The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social order--based on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealth--that determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and asks: How can we activate care justice or just care where people feel cared affirmatively and care being used for the wellbeing of community and for just world making?
 
Cover ArtDisability Visibility by Alice Wong (Editor)
ISBN: 9781984899422
Publication Date: 2020-06-30
"Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences. It's an eye-opening collection that readers will revisit time and time again."-Chicago Tribune One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent-but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people,just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, From Harriet McBryde Johnson's account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond- this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
 
Streaming Videos

Video: Through deaf eyes

Publication Date: 2007
Explores nearly 200 years of Deaf life in America. Presents the experiences of American history from the perspective of Deaf citizens. Six artistic works by Deaf media artists are woven throughout the documentary that compliment the core of the film.
 
Video: Vision Portraits
Publication Date: 2019
VISION PORTRAITS is a deeply personal documentary by award-winning filmmaker Rodney Evans (BROTHER TO BROTHER) as he explores how his loss of vision may impact his creative future, and what it means to be a blind or visually impaired creative artist. It's a celebration of the possibilities of art created by a Manhattan photographer (John Dugdale), a Bronx-based dancer (Kayla Hamilton), a Canadian writer (Ryan Knighton) and the filmmaker himself, who each experience varying degrees of vision loss. Using archival material alongside new illuminating interviews and observational footage of the artists at work, Evans has created a tantalizing meditation on blindness and creativity, a sensual work that opens our minds to new possibilities.
 
Video: Emmanuel's Gift
Publication Date: 2004
In Emmanuel's Gift, filmmakers Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern have uncovered a story as compelling as it is important. Narrated by Oprah Winfrey, the film chronicles the life of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, a young Ghanaian man born with a severely deformed right leg, who today, against incalculable odds, is opening minds, hearts and doors-and effecting social and political change throughout his country.. If you are born disabled in Ghana, West Africa you are likely to be poisoned, or left to die by your family. If you are not poisoned or left for dead, you are likely to be hidden away in a room or spend your life begging on the streets. Of the twenty million people in Ghana, two million are disabled. This is the story of one disabled man whose mission and purpose is to change all that forever.
 
Video: Fixed : the science/fiction of human enhancement
Publication Date: 2015
There is a growing buzz around the potential for science and technology to create significant "human enhancement" applications, such as bionic limbs, improved memory or cognition, or the ability to choose specific characteristics for our offspring. The possibilities stir the imagination and excitement of many, while for others the rhetoric and current research into human enhancement signals alarms of a new eugenics. And yet, for most non-scientists, this sounds like the realm of science fiction, a world awash in mystery and misunderstanding. With cameo performances by some of the world's leading integrated dance companies, featuring disabled and non-disabled dancers and artists, including the Anjali Dance Company, Antoine Hunter (of Sins Invalid and Urban Jazz Dance Company), AXIS, Candoco, Dancing Wheels, GIMP, Kounterclockwise, Lisa Bufano, Marc Brew, Remix Dance Company, and Sue Austin/Freewheeling. Through a dynamic mix of verité, dance, archival and interview footage, Fixed challenges notions of normal, the body and what it means fundamentally to be human in the 21st century.
 
Video: Who Am I To Stop It?
Publication Date: 2016
A documentary film on isolation, art, and transformation after brain injury made by a filmmaker with disabilities from brain injury. It follows three artists as they navigate social isolation, stigma, and rebuilding their identities. They practice the arts to re-connect to their own sense of self-pride and to their larger communities. Rather than emphasize how people got injured or highlight medical aspects of disability, we explore consequences of internalized ableism and the ways in which many brain injury survivors feel they are not accommodated or understood. Through visual arts, music, and sharing their stories, the subjects explore questions around poverty, sexuality, faith, family, success, and community.
 
Video: Code of the Freaks
Publication Date: 2020
Looks at how people with disabilities have been portrayed in the movies. Includes clips of movies from the past century.